“He’ll be too much trouble, Halina,” my sister said on the phone, two days before Thanksgiving. “I cancelled the van. He’s too tired for all that, and I’m the one who’d have to deal with him after.”
I was sitting in my pickup in the lot of the county highway shop on my lunch break, a ham sandwich on my knee, watching the boys back a plow truck into bay three.
“He’s not too tired,” I said. “I talked to him Sunday. He asked me twice if his good shirt was clean. He asked me who was carving this year.”
“You talked to him for ten minutes on the phone,” Bernadette said. “I’m there every single day. You don’t see what he’s like by four o’clock. You don’t see him every day.”
That was the sentence. I had known it was coming the way you know a storm is coming when the sky goes green over the county line. It was true, and it was beside the point.
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“Okay,” I said, because I did not want to fight with my sister in a pickup truck with my sandwich going stale. “Okay, Bernie. I’ll call you later.”
I hung up. Then I did something I had never done in forty nine years of being the younger sister. I checked up on her.
Back in October, Bernadette had called my brother and me with the idea. Dad had been in the nursing home in Pulaski since his stroke in March, and she said a wheelchair van for Thanksgiving would run about $300 with the holiday rate.
“Send me a hundred and fifty each,” she had said. “I’ll book it with the transport outfit out of Green Bay. They’ll pick him up and bring him home after. We’ll do the hall dinner like always.”
My brother Casimir drives truck out of Amarillo and has not made it home for a holiday in six years. He sent his share the same afternoon. I sent mine that Friday, a check with “Dad, Thanksgiving van” written on the memo line.
Now I sat in my truck and looked up the transport company on my phone and called the number on their page.
A tired woman answered on the fourth ring, and I asked her about a pickup in Pulaski on Thanksgiving Day.
“I’ve got no booking under Kowalczyk,” she said after a minute of clicking. “Not for Thursday, not for any day this month. Nobody by that name has called us since summer.”
“Could it be under Bernadette?” I asked. “Or under the nursing home? Somebody was supposed to book it in October.”
“Hon, I’ve got three runs on Thanksgiving and none of them are going to Pulaski,” she said, and she said it kindly. “If you want one now, I’m full. I’m sorry.”
I called Bernadette back at ten after one, when my lunch was over and I should have been inside at my desk ordering cutting edges for the plows.
“You never booked it,” I said. “I called them. They don’t have a thing under our name. Where’s the three hundred, Bernie?”
The line went quiet for so long I thought the call had dropped. Then she breathed out, and I could hear her kitchen behind her, the radio on low and the furnace kicking on.
“The electric was two months behind,” she said. “They sent the pink notice. I was going to put it back before Christmas. I didn’t think it mattered, because he’s too tired to go anyway. He is, Halina.”